AMD Athlon 1.33 GHz 266 MHz FSB Review

Test Setup and Cooling

This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective's website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.

The new 1.33 GHz Athlon processor uses the new 133/266 MHz front-side bus. So, to take advantage of the higher bus speeds, we are forced to use a KT133A chipset motherboard board or AMD 760 chipset. The new VIA KT266 chipset will also support the processors, but it is not quite ready for release.

I chose to use the Iwill KK266 motherboard for all the KT133A sets of benchmarks. It has proven itself to be very stable and overclockable motherboard that is right for just about everyone. You can read our review to see why we have such great compliments for this motherboard. I used the Gigabyte 7DX motherboard for testing on the AMD 760 chipset.

For the heatsink, I used a brand that you might not have heard of. AMD recommended the Foxconn P/N PK0453AEDAU52. A very cryptic name, but I didn’t get a name or product code to go along with it. Sorry! :) This heatsink really impressed me. The first thing I noticed was the weight of the unit. The reason for it being so significantly heavy is the sanded aluminum plate under the standard heatsink. The texture of the plate, coupled with the included thermal epoxy created a very smooth and complete placement on the Athlon processor. The temperatures produced from the processor and this heatsink impressed me as well, coming in below the Thermaltake Super Orb and the Tai Sol series of socket-A fans.

Memory was not as important an issue on this test as far as bus speeds go, simply because the overclocking was done with the multiplier. I’ll get more into that later. I used two separate brands of memory, just to be complete, both Mushkin’s Rev2 SDRAM and the new PC150 memory from Corsair. The Corsair memory also impressed me and performed a slight bit faster than the Mushkin RAM, so I used it for the KT133A tests. For testing on the Gigabyte system, I used Corsair’s PC2100 DDR SDRAM. It, too, performed very well under the tests.

We used the rest of the standard test setup items, including an IDE 7200 RPM hard drive from IBM, the Hercules GeForce 2 GTS 64MB video card and the Windows 98 SE operating system (except of course on the SPEC tests, which require Windows 2000).